OmniGraffle Pro 6 review: Diagramming tool gets a facelift
The Omni Group’s venerable OmniGraffle Pro diagramming tool has been the standout program of its kind for years. The new version 6 continues that tradition with a modernized engine to enjoy and some interface changes to, well, get used to.
At its heart, OmniGraffle Pro is for creating diagrams. Flowcharts, organization charts, software wireframes, space planning, and entity relationship diagrams are some of the classic uses. OmniGraffle Pro’s new Resource Browser offers various templates and shape collections called Stencils for creating these documents. If, say, you’re working on a new floor plan for an office, you can choose from the Resource Browser a space-planning template where 1 inch equals 1 foot. Then in the template you can drag and drop walls, doors, and furniture objects from the space planning stencils.
One of OmniGraffle Pro’s sleeper features is the ability to store metadata about any given object.
Despite the “complete user interface redesign” touted by The Omni Group, using version 6 is not dramatically different from OmniGraffle Pro’s previous incarnation. All of the tools and controls have been redrawn with an eye to making their functions easily understood at a glance. In doing so, they’ve made a nod to the flat design aesthetic recently embraced by Apple for iOS 7. Those who aren’t fans of flat design needn’t fret—the effect is a subtle improvement, not a jarring change.
The various object inspectors and drawing and layer tools behave as they did in the past. That’s definitely a good thing as we’ve previously lauded OmniGraffle Pro’s usability in these pages. One significant change is that the Object Inspector and Stencil Palette are now incorporated into the document window as a column down the right side. Both were previously presented as independent floating palettes. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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